When John Teza, our President & CEO, joined the Hand & Stone team in August of 2020, he immediately shared his successes and growth from attending past Multi-Unit Franchising Conferences hosted by Franchise Update Media. JT explained the education and networking he always took away from the annual event and it quickly became a no-brainer that the Hand & Stone franchise development team should attend and represent our brand.
Our planning for the event started with knocking the dust off our conference display booth, which hadn’t been used in quite some time. After little review, we realized that if we were going to attend one of the largest franchising events for the first time, we had some work to do!
Our team started to check tasks off our event-prep list. We redesigned the conference booth, connected with our skincare partners for product giveaways, and assembled a few of our top-tier, multi-unit franchisees to attend the event with us. Our skincare partners, Clarity Rx and Dermalogica jumped at the opportunity to supply us with their products to share with those franchisees visiting our future booth, and spoiler alert – they were a HIT!
On August 31st, we landed in Las Vegas, constructed our new booth, and headed out to the first event of the week. Hand & Stone was privileged to be a sponsor of the opening social at Brooklyn Bowl. This event allowed our team to have one-on-one conversations with the conference attendees. Great food, drinks, and even better networking!
The next two days were full of listening, learning, and valuable time at our booth with not only the 600+ franchisee attendees but other franchisors, exhibitors, and vendors. I noticed there were a lot of franchisee attendees who were eager to talk about service base concepts in the Health & Wellness space. Many walked away with a new outlook on our model, real estate criteria, and market availability throughout the country. Our booth being #500 was fitting seeing we had just recently surpassed 500 open units as a brand and still have over 1300 more territories available throughout the US and Canada.
The top-tier multi-unit owners I mentioned before that accompanied us were actually speaking at the event as well. Nick Marco, Toya Evans, and Chanel Grant presented in breakout sessions and our biggest franchisee, Eric Danver, sat on a panel next to other franchise industry veterans. All four of our owners were standout stewards of the Hand & Stone brand. I sat proudly in the audience listening to our franchisees speak on their strong belief in our model and concept, as well as the franchising industry.
From registration to the welcome cocktail event to the standout keynote speakers, and outstanding event staff, we are already looking forward to our second Multi-Unit Conference in March 2022. Our team is even more excited to leave the 2021 event with great connections and actively working towards welcoming attendees from our first conference as Hand & Stone franchisees.
Reach out to me, Nicole Alrburger, or our Director of Franchise Development, Sarah Moudry for more information.
